161–170 of 280 posts
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Mine is a criticism of the actual article. The reply to mine is a personal attack against me, a member of this site. This is generally understood to be a violation of the site guidelines, though they don't explicitly say "no ad hominems." In Comments Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of callin…
> Mine is a criticism of the actual article. No it wasn't. You literally claimed the author had a mental break down. That's not an attack on the article, it was a direct attack on him. I literally formed my comment exactly as you did to relay that point. You seemed to have taken such issue with the idea that the guy is lucky, you attacked him personally rather than attack his point. I don't entirely agree with the au…
It's fine for people to think basic income will be a good solution to the situation before us. I don't happen to agree with that position. But personal guilt and appealing to some just world fallacy is not a substantive argument for why we should try to make this happen.
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I couldn't disagree more. As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential. I don't mean that we should give everyone a million dollars to invest of their own. What I mean is that we should ensure that everyone gets provided with a good education and food/water/shelter, etc. The author specifically mentions the…
> keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor. Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. There is no conspiracy to "enslave" anyone, nearly all public health and wealth measures over the last 100 years are overwhelming up and to the right. That growth did not happened throu…
Have you had a look at 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread? Here's an excerpt:
>For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people’s sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.
...
>The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner’s grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?
>In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work — though not always even that — only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.
I'd really recommend a read, I used to think as you did, that we are born poor. In reality, we are born with the riches of the world around us, yet ungraspable.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-c...
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Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. In this case, there are a lot of complex dynamics at play: will workers emigrate elsewhere if trained well (Basically the IIT problem)? Are constituents/subjects ok with reductions in their quality of life so that other people can be provided these resources. To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic. Also yes of course I…
The core fallacy here is believing that we can all agree to supersede biological imperatives and everything will all go fine. The challenge of society is the establishment of a system that cooperates with biology to create a peaceful, prosperous environment for all members of that society. Humans are naturally competitive. Humans have tribal instincts (which include a default hostility to known outgroups). Humans hav…
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How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
Slaves have frequently been among the most high-status, most powerful people in their society. The slave who manages an important man's affairs is himself an important man. Concubines frequently wield power through their well-placed lovers. At the historical extreme, Wu Zetian was a concubine who worked her way up to being formally crowned emperor. The Mamluk Turks were slaves. This didn't stop them from taking contr…
Because what you just wrote sounds an awful like a defence of slavery.
What's awful about slavery is not the treatment of the slave. It's the fact that they are slaves in the first place.
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Its only luck if you consider every person independent of their ancestors, rather than a product of their ancestors.
Well yes, I consider who your ancestors are as part of being lucky, as you don't do anything to deserve who your ancestors are. What would you call it?
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My point was that each garbage collector is more valuable to the person paying for them than Oprah Winfrey is, but Oprah makes hundreds of millions of dollars and the garbage collector makes a typical wage. I understand the reasoning that Oprah provides a little value that is distributed to a lot of people and that the garbage industry in its totality is more valuable than Oprah. With all that, I still think it's a b…
I think it's painfully obvious that Oprah provides more value than one garbage man, so I don't see the disconnect. Also your above comment even says that "to the person paying them." I pay Oprah and the garbage man, respectively, what they're worth to me. I guess it hurts your feelings that Oprah has more value than your local garbage man, but it's just a fact. You can probably come up with the reasons yourself: pers…
This is marginal value, the stuff that someone would give up in order to have one more of a thing.
A celebrity often makes money because, for whatever reason, nobody can easily and reliably produce an equivalent one on demand.
Folks working for wages in less-glamorous positions are doing valuable things for society, but fundamentally their pay is based on how easily society could replace them.
> I lucked into money. The basic point is that he gets paid more whilst not doing more "work". For those whom "Work" is the only lever they use to convert into money, they see inequitable work:cash ratios as "unfair" (a morality statement). Market economies do not function on work, but on value. He did the same work in a high value scenario. A glass of water provided in the middle of a developed city is worthless and…
The point being made that the rentier class, usually applauded for their success, in many cases does not take the risks so widely ascribed to it, and creates wealth for select few beneficiaries simply by having more wealth.
Surely you will agree that in a given locale, the amount of land is a fixed amount. A single entity is able to extract more value from land simply by denying others use of it, which is of dubious value to the society at large. I won't go so far as to declare property = theft, but you can't help but wonder about the negative externalities of a few parties owning the vast majority of land and developments in a given area.
Without ill intentions, people are forced to pay rent, allowing the rentier class to accumulate more and more wealth by simply doing nothing. This is in contrast to innovative companies that provide real value to customers and create wealth for all involved (e.g. a farmer buying a piece of machinery to produce more food)
The article is mainly about a subset of capitalism where money is produced for the owner class without the tangible value exchange for the people from whom that money is extracted, and about how surprisingly well it scales.
Wow I am astounded that all the comments so far are trying to tear down this person and what he is saying, and very transparently because there seems to be something threatening about this idea that he got where he has through luck. Why do people find this idea so threatening? I got where I am today due to luck. I did work hard. But I know other people who work hard too. Who are just as capable. They just didn't get…
Because a lot of people want to believe they "earned" what they have and they weren't extremely lucky.
> I lucked into money. The basic point is that he gets paid more whilst not doing more "work". For those whom "Work" is the only lever they use to convert into money, they see inequitable work:cash ratios as "unfair" (a morality statement). Market economies do not function on work, but on value. He did the same work in a high value scenario. A glass of water provided in the middle of a developed city is worthless and…
I couldn't disagree more. As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential. I don't mean that we should give everyone a million dollars to invest of their own. What I mean is that we should ensure that everyone gets provided with a good education and food/water/shelter, etc. The author specifically mentions the…
Although I totally agree with this, individuality also plays a big role in development. The unfairness for someone is the good luck of another one thanks to his parents or grandparents. All conditions been equal, individuality will always makes society unequal. I think we should at least guarantee a worthy life to everyone.
But then what you do with someone that can't make a living but don't want to get educated? If you give him enough to live, he will still be a second class citizen.